I saw the stark betrayal illuminated by my headlights on a late Thursday night in September as I drove up our lane with a bag of hospital laundry. The yard light cast its familiar beam against the south wall of our barn, but the wood was suddenly flat and gray instead of the vibrant red it had been for my entire life. My husband Arlo and I have farmed our three hundred and twenty acres of corn and soybeans outside Tracy for thirty seven years. That barn was constructed back in 1925 by Arlo’s grandfather Walter Jensen using lumber hauled on a hay wagon pulled by Belgian draft horses. Arlo’s father Earl milked forty Holsteins inside those walls and even painted the structure by hand in the summer of 1958. Earl proudly painted his initials and the year high above the haymow door, a legacy that Arlo used to show our son Brad when he was a little boy. Standing in my driveway after being away at the hospital for eleven days, I stared at a gray wall that erased generations of our family history in a single sweeping stroke.
My absence was necessary because Arlo suffered a severe stroke on the left side of his brain on the last Saturday of August. One moment he was standing up from the supper table to get coffee, and the next moment he was unable to hold the pot or speak my name. I called for an ambulance immediately, and he was flown by helicopter to a hospital in Sioux Falls where he spent four days in intensive care before moving to the rehabilitation floor. I slept in an uncomfortable vinyl chair and refused to leave his side until a charge nurse named Lorraine finally forced me to go home and sleep in my own bed. That was when I discovered the fresh gray paint and called my son Brad, who sells real estate in Marshall. Brad proudly explained that he paid a spray crew from Worthington four thousand dollars to paint the barn gray and white because those colors are popular with buyers. He assumed Arlo would never return to run the farm, so he had already scheduled a photographer to take listing pictures on Monday morning.
I felt as though I had been robbed in my sleep, and a deep anger took root in my heart as I walked through the wet grass around the building in my navy church shoes. Shining a flashlight up at the east end, my heart broke completely when I saw that Earl’s historic hand painted initials and the 1958 date were completely covered by smooth gray paint. I sat in the damp grass and cried, not just over the color of the wood, but because my own son had decided his father was never coming home. Knowing Arlo could understand everything but struggle to speak, I refused to bring a bitter family argument into his hospital room. Instead of calling the spray crew to yell at them or calling Brad back to express my fury, I decided to fix the problem myself. I found Arlo’s measuring tape and calculated the dimensions of the building, figuring out that I needed to cover approximately forty five hundred square feet of siding. I sat at my kitchen table doing the arithmetic on an electric bill envelope, fully determined to restore our farm before Monday.
Early Friday morning I drove to the farm store in Marshall and presented my calculations to Gene Haugland at the paint counter. Gene knew exactly which barn I was talking about and recommended forty gallons of authentic barn red paint to ensure the rough boards were thoroughly covered. I spent over seventeen hundred dollars from our household bank account on eight five gallon pails of red paint, two gallons of white trim paint, rollers, brushes, and drop cloths. Knowing I could not do this alone, I contacted Nate Ellison, the youth pastor at our local church, to ask if he could bring some kids on Saturday. Nate eagerly agreed and organized twenty two teenagers while establishing strict safety rules to ensure no young kids would ever climb the tall ladders. I then reached out to our longtime neighbor Merle Rasmussen, who immediately offered to rent a forty five foot towable lift from a rental place in Marshall. Merle insisted on running the lift himself alongside Mike Olson so we could safely reach the high gambrel ends that stretch thirty six feet into the air.
I spent Friday afternoon back in Sioux Falls watching Arlo work incredibly hard in the therapy gym, proudly taking steps between parallel bars and managing to call me by his special nickname for me. I kept the secret of the barn safe, choosing to tell him about the soybeans and the farm cats instead of burdening him with our son’s premature real estate plans. Early Saturday morning my yard was filled with cars, minivans, four fathers with extension ladders, and twenty two teenagers ready to work under the beautiful clear September sky. Following a short prayer and a safety talk from Nate, the massive restoration effort began with kids rolling paint along the bottom eight feet while the fathers carefully supervised the extension ladders. Merle and Mike expertly maneuvered the lift high above the roofline, cutting in the edges with wide brushes as the older kids vigorously worked the deep red paint into the rough wood grain. By mid morning the trendy gray was rapidly disappearing board by board, replaced by the rich traditional red that belonged to our family, lovingly applied by neighbors and children who simply wanted to bring Arlo’s barn back to life.